Talk:North America
I created this page yesterday using material from Countries of the world. There are some problems to be worked out with the Bahamas display (I tried to deal with that by simplifying the template, but it didn't work), and also a number of minor typos to correct in the links. However, whenever I have tried to edit the page today, the source code that shows up in the editor is full of all sorts of garbage that wasn't there yesterday -- strings of single quotes, nowiki tags, exposed table row specs, and so on. This has happened both at home and at the library, using a total of three different computers, my satellite connection and two different in-town wireless connections. (At one point, the editor displayed the compiled HTML for the page rather than wikitext.) If I were to open this page for editing right now, then save the page without making any changes, it would look very different and very messed up. I'm guessing that this may be a temporary problem with the Wikia server; whatever it is, I hope it clears up soon so I can go in there, spiff it up and add more material. The weird thing is, the same thing didn't happen with the Europe page. --KathleenSeidel 18:52, 20 May 2009 (UTC) Individual pages Countries have individual pages but some former colonies or other not strictly independent territories may be added here and need the first section of the following instruction. Countries and territories then all (at the time of writing) need sections two and three, in that order. Copy Afghanistan; modify two lines; copy the result Copy from its edit box (click here), of course. Then click on any red link that represents a state or territory in this continent and paste your copy into the page, then change the description and/or continent name in the second line and the second category. Copy the result and (after saving the page you are on) use that copy for the rest of the continent. Each country or territory may need some modification to the first part of the second line. You may want an atlas handy so as to give readers a useful indication of where the place is. On pre-existing territory pages, merge any existing material into the new structure; delete none of what you pasted in, except that any territory description may replace the standard short version that you pasted in. Check existing links; I found one that was faulty because a closing parenthesis got included in it. The link under "Authorities" points you to the yet-to-be-created "/info" subpage and will be miraculously replaced (visually) with the subpage contents (used as a template) when there are some. Copy Kathleen's links into subpages Then, or in batches later, do to Countries of the world or the continent list (whichever has the later version if they differ) what I did to the New Zealand row in Oceania and the countries page: copy the block of links into the territory subpage. The stuff at the top of New Zealand/info is a non-urgent extra, which does not show in any transclusion of the links list onto another page. There should be no "newline"/"carriage return" between it and the first link. For convenience of finding, here's a copy of it: (Note that this page is used as a template on other pages.) Category:authoritiesInfo After any country or territory has its subpage containing the latest version, any changes should be made only to that subpage, not to the cells on the continent or countries pages. If changes are needed, those multi-country version cells must be replaced, as described below. Replace original links lists with template calls that transclude each country or territory subpage Much easier than it may sound! Each of the "Column 3" cells in the multi-country versions can then be replaced, at leisure (or as soon as amendments are made), with : '''plus the country or territory name' dragged across or down (or copied exactly from the country or territory page if different) to sit between the colon and the slash. That too will display the links from the subpage. I'm sorry I didn't think of this before Kathleen created the continent pages. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 12:44, 25 May 2009 (UTC)